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Historical Materialism in Medieval China: the Cases of Liu Zongyuan (773-819) and Li Gou (1009-1059)

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Historical Materialism in Medieval China: the Cases of Liu Zongyuan (773-819) and Li Gou (1009-1059) Asian Philosophy An International Journal of the Philosophical Traditions of the East ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/casp20 Historical materialism in medieval China: The cases of Liu Zongyuan (773-819) and Li Gou (1009-1059) Dawid Rogacz To cite this article: Dawid Rogacz (2021): Historical materialism in medieval China: The cases of Liu Zongyuan (773-819) and Li Gou (1009-1059), Asian Philosophy, DOI: 10.1080/09552367.2021.1924437 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09552367.2021.1924437 Published online: 07 May 2021. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=casp20 ASIAN PHILOSOPHY https://doi.org/10.1080/09552367.2021.1924437 Historical materialism in medieval China: The cases of Liu Zongyuan (773-819) and Li Gou (1009-1059) Dawid Rogacz Faculty of Philosophy, Adam Mickiewieicz University, Poznan, Poland ABSTRACT KEYWORDS It is commonly assumed that historical materialism was first developed by Historical materialism; Liu Karl Marx, whose philosophy is often equated with this idea. The following Zongyuan; Li Gou; Neo- paper challenges this opinion by showing that historical materialism, Confucianism; feudalism understood as a general position within the philosophy of history, can be traced back to two generally unheralded Chinese thinkers: Liu Zongyuan (773–819) and Li Gou (1009–1059). Historical materialism is here under­ stood as a standpoint built on three tenets: (1) a belief in the dependence of culture on the material fundaments of social life; (2) the interpretation of human history through the prism of structural transformations; and (3) understanding political and economic relationships in terms of antagonism between social groups. After elaborating upon the presence of these tenets in the thought of Liu and Li, the paper analyzes the influence of their ideas and, finally, points out the main differences between the premodern and modern forms of historical materialism. It is widely assumed that historical materialism was first developed by Karl Marx. In fact, the concept of historical materialism is usually treated as a byword for the Marxist view of history. The Marxist appropriation of this attractive and capacious notion is one of the greatest obstacles to recognizing the presence of materialist views of history anywhere else. The following paper challenges this dominant opinion by showing that historical materialism, understood as a general position within the philosophy of history, can be traced back to two generally little known Chinese thinkers: Liu Zongyuan (773–819) and Li Gou (1009–1059). The first part of the paper outlines the adopted understanding of historical materialism. Then, the paper shows the presence of such a position in the thought of Liu Zongyuan and Li Gou. The next section sheds a light on the limited influence of their ideas and, finally, analyzes main differences between premodern and modern form of historical materialism, as represented by Liu and Li on the one hand, and Marx on the other, which naturally overlap with the differences between its Asian and Western variant. The matter of history: Refreshing and broadening the concept of historical materialism One of the main reasons for identifying historical materialism with Marxism is that the term itself and the intellectual labeling behind it were invented by Marx and Engels, and CONTACT Dawid Rogacz [email protected] Faculty of Philosophy, Adam Mickiewieicz University, Posnan, Szamarzewskiego 89C, Poznan 60-568, Poland © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 D. ROGACZ therefore their understanding of this notion merged with their own philosophy. Marx’s first formulation of what he calls ‘the materialist conception of history’ comes from The German Ideology (1846) and originates from his polemics with the Hegelians. The term ‘historical materialism’ does not appear in any of Marx’s writings, as it was coined by Friedrich Engels, in his 1880 Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. However, in the 1892 fore­ word to this work Engels adopted the broader use of the term ‘historical materialism’, without any explicit reference to Marx (although it was clear that Marx for him was its most direct exponent): I use, in English as well as in so many other languages, the term, “historical materialism”, to designate that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another. (Engels, 2020, p. 21) Of course, under this reading, the concept of the materialist view of history is still restricted to its economic variant. But even then, any thinker who successfully fulfils these general criteria in a way different from Marx, for instance, in some ‘pro- capitalistic’ or ‘anti-revolutionary’ manner, should be described as ‘historical materialist’, according to the definition of Engels himself. The assumption that historical materialism could be equated with Marx’s conception of history also served the Marxist narrative of the history of ideas, as well as its broader political agenda. To argue that only Marxism (and not, for instance, anarchism) provides the ‘scientific’ base for a future revolution, it was critical to show that historical materi­ alism is Marxism’s world-shaking discovery and the Good News announced amidst the depths of historical idealisms. While the ‘scientific’ interpretation of history is supposedly the only one ‘correct’ view (as though no thinker can explain the material determinants of historical development other than in the way Marxists do), the ‘erroneous’ and ‘mislead­ ing’ views of history have been numerous. This asymmetry meant that the variety of historical idealisms: absolute, objective, and subjective, or from a different viewpoint: theological, metaphysical, and psychological, does not translate into an equivalent diver­ sity in the materialist philosophies of history. But this fusion of Marxism with historical materialism had yet another paradoxical consequence. In the above-quoted Socialism, Engels stressed that the word ‘materialism’ is used in quite a peculiar manner, which might seem odd to those accustomed to the popular English associations of this term. The matter in question is social and refers to human relations of production and exchange, not to some crude substratum of nature. Yet even Engels himself, due to his genuine desire to validate the continuous transition from natural to social matter based on materialist dialectics, only deepened confusion regard­ ing the exact meaning of this eponymic ‘matter.’ Not surprisingly, Plekhanov soon began to interpret historical materialism as a dialectical materialism applied to social life and its history. Symptomatically, he also upheld that ‘geographical environment exercises no less decisive an influence on the fate also of larger societies’ (Plekhanov, 1947, p. 151), which not only testifies to his naturalist confusion, but also proves that the historically determi­ nant ‘matter’ does not have to be reduced to the economic one, as it might also (or only) cover the geographical fundaments of social life. But the paradox of Plekhanov was not limited to this theoretical shift. By arguing that historical materialism is identical with the ASIAN PHILOSOPHY 3 dialectics of social development that operates in accordance with the universal, dialectical laws of nature, its original meaning became largely ontologized. In this way, historical materialism ceased to denote a certain philosophy of history, but started to refer to a social ontology that explains not only past, but also present and future social phenom­ ena. Insofar as Marxism is understood as a form of social ontology, historical materialism was treated as its general byword. This paper postulates, first of all, to return to the original and proper meaning of the term ‘historical materialism’ as equivalent to the materialist conception of history, and to treat it as a position as general and internally diversified as historical idealism. Of course, this entails thinking of historical materialism as a standpoint represented by Marx, but at the same time treating it as relatively independent from his particular formulation. Importantly, such a strategy has already been implemented by so-called ‘analytical Marxists’ who tried to reframe historical materialism as a set of discrete theses (Cohen, 1978). Consequently, ‘extracting’ historical materialism from Marx’s thought required putting aside everything that was considered of historical import, in this case mostly ‘obscurantist’ Hegelian dialectics. However, in the hands of analytical Marxists, historical materialism was only re-established as a form of social ontology. Furthermore, such cherry-picking was contingent on one’s own reading of Marx and the importance of particular aspects of his thought. It seems that some general criteria for defining historical materialism should be recognized first,and only then should they be effectivelyapplied to concrete philosophies. Neither Liu Zongyuan nor Li Gou called themselves ‘historical materialists,’ which means that the formulation of such criteria is crucial for recognizing them as exponents of
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